Make Sure the Doors Are Locked
- Make Sure the Doors Are Locked
Elision in the stories included in Adam McOmber's My House Gathers Desires sets the collection apart from works on either side of an increasingly rickety (perhaps even invisible) demarcation line between literary and genre fiction. It's no accident that Brian Evenson's blurb figures prominently on the back cover. Evenson, a writer I have devoured since first reading "Two Brothers" in the The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories so many years ago, shares with McOmber a keen ability to crack open a sense of dread at the end of short fictions by employing final movements away from what's in frame. McOmber, like Evenson, also has a preternatural gift for concise description and the pyrotechnics of language, though McOmber's vocabulary and nuance remind me of the criminally underappreciated English writer and conservationist Robert Aickman more than anyone else.
At the ends of many stories in My House Gathers Desires the movements away from the visible and the comprehensible create space for the reader to fill. What is intimated by McOmber then blossoms like red tide in one's imagination. It's the territory, oddly enough, of both Shirley Jackson and James Joyce; the nameless terror, but also the profound resonance. One doesn't long for a tidy ending to "Araby," after all, or to The Haunting of Hill House.
The stories "Petit Trianon" and "The Re'em" (my favorite in the collection) generate open, disquieting spaces with precision. Other stories such as "The Rite of Spring" move similarly, but the effect is achieved with a chisel rather than a scalpel. This is not to disparage chisels. Who hasn't enjoyed a horror film where something unspeakable is about to happen and a breeze blows the door shut, occluding the terror from one's view, but also somehow feeding it and giving it real legs? Terror in My House Gathers Desires has real legs, and it's the kind of collection one (almost) wants to put down, if only for a brief respite, or to make sure the back door is securely locked.
McOmber's work seems best when the scalpel is firmly in hand. Not every story in this collection follows the pattern of a final elision, and there are many other gifts he shares with us in fictions that resolve themselves like a taut drum. The collection is wonderfully filled with queer characters who are neither doomed nor window-dressing, such as a King Arthur in "The Coil," so filled with longing for Sir Guyon as to invent quests to prolong their time together in the wilderness.
Almost every story in the collection, like "The Coil," scratches an itch for erudition. The range of research and reference is impressive; everything from 19th century Versailles to the biblical Sodom, even projecting forward into an opaque and dystopic future in "Night Is Nearly Done"—a future Jeff VanderMeer would approve of, given the way it is populated by grotesque bears with names like "Sackerson the Blind," "Whiting," "Stone," and "the behemoth Harry Hunks."
In addition to VanderMeer's Bjorn, the other work continually in my mind while reading "Night Is Nearly Done" was Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. This may have been a personal idiosyncrasy of reading, however. I loved McOmber's use of the phrase "necker ties" freighted with its disconnection from history, and its ability to round out a future landscape. Hoban's Riddley Walker uses language to develop a future setting similarly, albeit in an amped up fashion. The linguistic influence of Riddley Walker on the George Miller and Byron [End Page 190] Kennedy Mad Max films has been explored elsewhere, and in more detail. Idiosyncratic reading tic, or no, I am "here for it" in Hoban, in George Miller, and now, in McOmber; this use of language as world building scratches an itch I can rarely scratch as a reader, and as a viewer. The only recent work that comes close is perhaps The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth, or The Old Reactor by David Ohle.
"Range" may well be the most...
